[pianotech] Haynes Piano Manual

[David Boyce]

Aside from the Bibliography page of my site, which some of you were kind 
enough to look over and comment on and make useful  suggestions, I have 
now added a separate page about the Haynes Piano Manual, which I think 
deserves special mention.

As we know, technical piano books being a niche market, only relatively 
small print runs are feasible, which means no economy of scale, which 
means production costs have to be minimised, which means no colour.

Haynes are a mass-market publisher, well known for car owners manuals 
for many different models of car. In recent years they've branched out 
into household appliance manuals.  Now they have published a Piano 
owners Manual, co-written by John Bishop who is an experienced 
technician with a background in education, and Graham Barker, a writer.  
The slant here is towards piano owners rather than technicians. This is 
of course a much larger market, hence economy of scale, hence lovely 
full colour throughout.  It is so much easier to identify actions parts 
of green and red felt and light wood and grey metal, when they are 
reproduced in colour rather than shades of gray!

A boon for the UK market is that the pianos are UK pianos. Nothing 
against USA pianos at all, of course  - far from it - but the styles 
shown are more familiar to us here in the UK.

I have reproduced some pages on my website, to give an idea of the 
visual style of the book (reproduces for purposes of criticism or review 
under the Fair Dealing provision of the UK Copyright Designs and Patents 
Act 1988).

Here we have a full colour manual at a very reasonable price that would 
be a tremendously useful supplement to Reblitz for the trainee piano 
technician, as well as a great resource for all piano owners. It's 
exactly the kind of thing I wish had been available back in the 1970s 
when I was trying to find technical books on the piano.

http://www.davidboyce.co.uk/haynes-piano-manual.php

Best regards,

David.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/20120321/ec6d9f29/attachment.htm>